


socially relevant

by TheHarleyQueen



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Evie & Jay & Mal & Carlos de Vil as Found Family, Isle of the Lost (Disney) is a Terrible Place, Multi, Protests, Social Justice, United States of Auradon (Disney) Is Not Perfect, anti-government
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:55:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24557287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHarleyQueen/pseuds/TheHarleyQueen
Summary: Jay meets Mal several minutes after midnight when he’s trying to creep back into his father’s store {normally, he wouldn’t bother, he’d just find a corner somewhere and curl up, but it’s the middle of winter and the perpetual clouds over the Isle of the Lost look darker, which means snow, or sleet, or some other horrible thing}. She’s painting, and her hands are stained with still-wet paint. His eyes briefly roam over the wall, and he smirks.
Relationships: Evie & Jay & Mal & Carlos de Vil, Evie/Jay/Mal/Carlos de Vil
Comments: 13
Kudos: 164





	socially relevant

**Author's Note:**

> This story does not refer to any current movements or protests. Black Lives Matter is important, and it's important that we speak about it, but as a white woman, it is not for me to put these characters in that context. But protests are on the mind, and in the zeitgeist, and this is the product of that.

_Jay & Mal_

Jay meets Mal several minutes after midnight when he’s trying to creep back into his father’s store { _normally, he wouldn’t bother, he’d just find a corner somewhere and curl up, but it’s the middle of winter and the perpetual clouds over the Isle of the Lost look darker, which means snow, or sleet, or some other horrible thing_ }. She’s painting, and her hands are stained with still-wet paint. His eyes briefly roam over the wall, and he smirks.

“That’s a divisive message, baby fey,” he comments. She spins around, brandishing her can of spray paint like a weapon. He moves closer, studying her mural.

“Stay away from me,” she warns, and he turns to examine her instead.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he tells her, eyes soft. She’s a year younger than him, and he’s not up for bullying and harassing little kids. He’s not his father.

“Why wouldn’t you?” she asks, and it’s a fair question. In the low light, he can make out a yellowing bruise on her cheek, and he doesn’t think that there are many people on the Isle who would hit Maleficent’s daughter.

It’s enough to make him cry.

He doesn’t, because there’s no use in showing weakness. Instead, he holds out a hand { _literally, he’s offering her a nearly-empty bottle of rum that he’d nicked from Captain Hook. Metaphorically, he’s offering her his allegiance, an alliance. She takes both_ }.

He turns back to the wall she’s painting while she splashes the last of the alcohol over her cheek, hissing when it stings. She’s silent for a while, and he can feel his eyes on him.

“Don’t like the divisive message?” She asks. He laughs, short and harsh, and shakes his head at her.

“You’re gonna create big waves, aren’t you, baby fey?” He teases, and she rolls her eyes, before growing serious.

“You should call me Mal,” she tells him, “After all, you’ll be making them with me.”

*

When he wakes up, he’s still on the roof. At first, he thinks that the crowd of people gathered below are staring at him, but then he remembers.

Mal’s mural takes up the entire wall of the second story of his father’s shop. The words she’s written- _FUCK FASCIST USA_ \- are bold and stark black in contrast to the background yellows and blues of the Auradonian symbol.

{ _Within hours, three members of the Auradon Guard Force are up on his father’s roof, painting the wall white. He can’t see their faces behind the enchanted gold masks, but he wonders if they believe Mal’s words. He wonders if they have any idea about what living on the Isle is really like._

 _That night, he climbs up and spray-paints the words back onto the white wall, if not with Mal’s artistic flair_ }.

_Mal & Carlos_

Mal and Carlos were always their revolutionaries. They led protests in Coward’s Market, marches down the streets of the Isle. Mal painted caricatures of the King and Queen on the roofs of houses.

When the twentieth anniversary of the Isle of the Lost Solution rolls around, they take it a step up.

The march winds across the entire Isle of the Lost, ending in front of the Auradon Guard Force building { _to the kids who live on the Isle, the Auradon Guard Force is the symbol of how far Auradon control reaches. The AGF building houses the enemy_ }.

_FUCK YOUR KING,_

_FUCK YOUR ISLE,_

_FUCK YOUR DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL_

They chant until their voices are hoarse, until the sun has set. The minutes tick down to the exact day the United States of Auradon reanimated the villains that they’d killed and sealed them onto an island. She and Carlos slip away for a moment, trusting Jay to continue leading the chants.

“You ready for this?” Carlos asks as she changes. She hums from where she’s wiggling into her dress.

“Because we don’t have to do it, you know,” he reminds her, “there’s other ways.”

“They’re not as good as this one,” Mal tells him.

“We don’t even know if I’ll be able to break down the barrier-” “You will.” They stand in silence as Mal adjusts the crown that Evie made for her.

“C’mon, it’s not like it’s my first time,” she jokes, but Carlos remains silent. She sighs and hands him her knife { _it’s an ornate thing, supposed to be completely ceremonial. It belonged to her mother. Mal never lets it go_ }.

“This is how revolutions start, ‘Los,” she reminds him, “this is how we bring Auradon’s attention to us.” She places the other crown that Evie made onto his curls, and then looks him up and down. He’s wearing a blue suit- it had been far too big for him when they’d found it, but Evie’s alterations made it look good on him. The crown he’s wearing was designed to look like the Auradonian state crown { _or, at least, as close as they could see from the couple of propaganda clips they had access to_ }.

She pulls him into a deep kiss, hands around his neck, his mouth slanting against hers. His hands go up to her hair, but he pulls back suddenly, hissing.

“ _Fuck_.” She laughs lightly when she sees that he’s cut himself on her crown.

“Guess that’s what I get for being sacrilegious,” he jokes, sucking on the cuts to staunch the blood. She smiles at him but turns sombre as Evie rounds the corner. She doesn’t even need to say anything.

Mal makes her way back to the crowd, chanting as if she’d never left, but they start to go quiet when they notice what she’s wearing.

“In five minutes, it will have been twenty years since Auradon first implemented their detention without trial penal colony!” She screams. The other VKs cheer her on, pushing her on with cries of anger.

“We can’t die here. We eat your trash. We survive on your leftovers. We deserve to live freely.” She looks into Evie’s shitty cellphone camera where she’s recording the protest.

“Your messiah died for your sins. I will die for ours. And it won’t hold, but we will do this every year until you get it through your heads that we are innocent.” The Auradon Guard Force seem to have noticed them for the first time, pouring out of the building in their golden visors and pastel blue uniforms, batons ready.

Mal closes her eyes and tilts her head backwards. She feels Carlos at her back, and her mother’s knife at her throat, and then there’s only blackness.

*

Carlos breaks the barrier for a couple of seconds, and while they { _for the first time in their lives_ } breathe fresh air, he broadcasts the video out to all of Auradon- _the isle of the lost is a prison society_ , they tell Auradon. We are innocent.

When Crown Prince Ben invites them to Auradon Prep, Mal and Carlos both acknowledge the fact that he’s probably doing it to shut them up. They promise that they won’t.

_Jay & Evie_

Jay is Evie’s informant. She’s not allowed to leave the house, by order of Maleficent, but Jay sneaks in when his dad locks him out and she lets him stay in exchange for information { _he doesn’t know what she’s doing with it, but doesn’t much care_ }.

When he tumbles in through her window one day, she’s got a Rapunzel joke halfway figured out when she actually _looks_ at him. He looks haggard, more tired than usual.

“What’s going on?” She immediately asks as she rushes over to catch him before he falls over. She half-carries him over to her bed.

“The barge didn’t come.” If it weren’t unladylike, her jaw would have dropped. The barge is all they have, it’s their entire livelihood. The Isle won’t survive a whole month if they don’t get what comes on the barge, even if it _is_ Auradon’s trash.

“What are we doing about it?”

“Doing? We’re not _doing_ anything, E. Well, there are some people rioting down at the docks, but that doesn’t count. Come on, E, you know the circumstances. We can’t grow food, we have no jobs, nothing to barter with except what Auradon brings us. We’re fucked.”

Evie stared at him, long and hard. Then she sighed.

“Sleep,” she said, “you need it”.

He wasn’t awake for long enough to argue with her.

*

When Jay wakes up, he hears a _ridiculously_ loud noise. He’s never heard anything like it in his life, and he wonders if he’s dead.

He’s not dead. He sticks his head out of Evie’s window and sees a fucking _helicopter_ inside the barrier. He all but throws himself out of her room, scaling the wall in record time. He starts sprinting down to where the helicopter is hovering.

When he reaches it, he nearly stops entirely. Evie, _his_ _Evie,_ his _banned_ Evie, is banging her fists against the barrier. In fact, there’s a line of VK kids, stretched around the barrier as far as he can see in either direction, and they’re all pushing against the barrier, hitting and beating with any manner of weapons- rusted pipes, and baseball bat, a crowbar.

It’s not making any difference, not that he thought that it would, but it’s a _statement_. They’re telling Auradon that it’s gone _too far_.

There are AGF members in the helicopter, and he thinks they’re yelling for the kids to stand down- he can barely hear them over the din of their helicopter. He’d ignore them even if he could hear them. Instead, he finds a space between Evie and Mal, and throws all his weight against the golden barrier.

_Evie & Carlos_

In the hours after they’ve defeated Maleficent, Mal is pulled in every direction. Every newspaper, every news channel, wants to know the _scoop_ , wants to know what happened. Evie and Carlos submit the paperwork for an immediate meeting with King Ben. They’re granted the meeting because Mal has used her platform well.

*

Evie and Carlos sit at a meeting table across from the King, their paperwork laid out in front of them { _Ben is surrounded by lawmakers, by lawyers and policymakers. Evie and Carlos are the closest thing the Isle has to lawyers_ }.

“We’re proposing an immediate end to the Isle of the Lost,” Evie begins, handing each over a stack of papers with their agenda and proposals.

“I’d have made copies if I knew there were going to be so many of you,” she continues, subtly digging at the fact that the king seems to find two Isle kids so scary that he needs six advisors.

“We won’t be needing them anyway,” the man on Ben’s left tells her. He’s probably sixty, and he’s wearing an expensive suit. Evie thinks it might be a Cruella design, actually- “there’s no way your proposal will go through. You’re wasting the King’s time.” He actually _stands up to leave_ , but Evie stands up as well, moving to block his exit { _she and Carlos were accustomed to positioning themselves near the exit of a room, and it paid_ }.

“The United States of Auradon are in direct violation of articles one, three, seven, nine, eleven, twenty-one, _and_ twenty-five of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That’s seven counts. Now, _sit down_ , and listen to our proposal, or we will be forced to take further legal action against the government of the United States of Auradon.”

He looks suitably cowed as he slinks back to his seat. Ben is still silent.

“The Isle of the Lost was a fucked up system in the first place,” Carlos takes over, “an island penal colony surrounded by magical preventions to keep people from dying could never have worked forever. When they started having kids, you should have overhauled the system, because you were condemning their children for the actions of their parents.”

“Those were my parents’ mistakes-” Ben starts, but Carlos cuts over him again. “And our parents’ crimes weren’t our fault. But we end up being the ones needed to make reparations. Auradon needs to fix their mistakes.”

“What would you ask of us?” The same lawyer that had tried to leave asks, “We can’t just free the criminals.”

“What’s your name?” Evie asks sweetly, and Carlos has to hide a smile.

“Jean Potts,” he responds, and his eyes flicker with the ghost of the question _‘as in Mrs Potts?’_.

“Mr Potts,” Evie begins, “more than half of the population of the Isle of the Lost have never been tried in a court of law. My boyfriend and I certainly never were. I want to make it clear that I _do_ expect the Isle of the Lost system to be completely dismantled. And soon. And if you would _let us finish_ , you will receive our full proposal.”

He sinks back into his seat, and Carlos takes Evie’s hand below the table, squeezing it gently. She looks over, meeting his eyes, and swallows deeply.

They’re in this together.

_Jay & Carlos_

When Jay first mentions the idea, Carlos thinks he’s probably gone insane from the exposure to Auradon. His explanation didn’t convince him otherwise.

“They’ll _actually_ kill us,” he argues, but they’re in Auradon and it doesn’t have the same meaning it did when they were on the Isle of the Lost. “They’ll definitely kick us off the team.”

Jay just looks at him with a raised eyebrow, and he sighs.

“I know. We only got the opportunity to be on the team because we got here. They deserve the opportunity too.”

Jay smiles, carding his fingers through Carlos’s hair.

*

He and Jay are warming up on the side of the tourney pitch. Evie waves at them from the stands, and he can see Mal biting her nails. They’ve got two plans running simultaneously, with the love spell and this. It’s kinda nerve-wracking, but he swallows the anxiety and continues his warm-up.

Apparently, high school tourney is a huge deal in Auradon- as in, it gets broadcast live across the country. He doesn’t get it. But they’d watched the tourney games and made fun of the princes when they went down, and he and Jay had been asked to sign waivers to give the TV station permission to record them.

The coach lays out his plan, and Jay heroically stands up and gets Carlos put in the game as a starter. _Well, at least he’ll be a starter in the only tourney match he’ll ever play._

The teams take their places on the field, and Carlos catches Jay’s eye. He pulls in a deep breath and nods. They can do this.

The whistle blows and the players take off, but the crowd is muted. A cheerleader screams, but it’s not a cheer. There are questions being yelled out from the stands.

Some of the players slow down, glancing around to try to find the problem. Carlos doesn’t need to. He knows what he’ll see. The electronic scoreboard, which shows the live television feed so that the crowd can see plays more clearly, is playing a different video. It’s a recording from one of their older rallies, in the middle of Coward’s Market. They’d been shouting, but mostly peaceful { _well, for the Isle, anyway_ }, when the Auradon Guard Force tear-gassed the place- no warning, just a canister being thrown into the square, and a cry going up amongst the VKs.

Behind him, he hears Mal take up the chant- _THERE ARE NO EXCUSES FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES_. He joins her, and Jay and Evie. The girls make their way down to the pitch, taking their place next to him. Mal’s hand is in his, and his is in Jay’s, and Jay’s is in Evie’s.

He doesn’t expect Li Lonnie to join them, but it’s welcome. Aziz stands next to Mal. Jane joins them, louder than he’s ever heard her be. It’s not a solution- they haven’t fixed the problem. But it’s a start.

_Mal & Evie_

Really, Evie’s the one who turns Mal on to social justice in the first place. It’s a week before her sixth birthday party, and she’s skipping across the schoolyard { _which is just a dried-out field surrounded by 6-foot wire fencing_ }. She sits down next to Mal, and for Mal, it’s the first person who’s ever been so completely unafraid of her. She glares, but it slides off the princess like water.

“What do you want?” Mal snaps, and Evie flinches back for a second but bounces back fast.

“I need help.”

“Go ask someone else,” Mal snapped at her. “I don’t help people.”

“You’re the scariest person I know,” Evie says, “and I need to scare someone.”

“I’m six.” Mal reminds her. “I’m not scary to anyone older than that.”

“You’re Maleficent’s daughter,” Evie argues, “and besides, I only need you to scare a couple of high schoolers.”

Mal looks the other girl up and down. She blinks earnestly.

“Yeah, okay. Who?”

“The Gastons- second and third.” She didn’t think that the princess even _knew_ any of the Gastons. Still, she stands up and makes her way over to the other end of the courtyard, where she’d noticed the Gaston siblings. She stalks up to them, and _oh_.

Gil is sitting nearby, but not with, his older brothers. He has a black eye, and a necklace of bruises around his neck. When she nears, he tries to scramble up, but then winces and lets out a yelp as he collapses back to the floor.

The noise their brother makes alerts the Gastons to her presence, but she doesn’t mind. She _wants_ them to know that she’s here, and what she can do to them.

“Maleficent’s kid, right?” The older asks her, and she nods shortly. He lets out a dry bark of laughter. “What do you want?”

“You’re going to stop hurting your brother,” she tells him, not mincing for words. “ _Both_ of you,” she emphasizes when they don’t react.

“Why the fuck do you care?” Gaston the Third asks her, and Mal stares at him silently. She goes over to Gil, and checks his wounds. She whispers comfort to him, signalling Evie over. When helps him move out of the way, and when they’re safely out of the courtyard, Mal turns back to her victims.

“The fey don’t hurt kids. Gil is weaker than you, and he can’t fight back. At least be honourable when picking your fights.”

“This is the Isle. No one’s _honourable_ ,” Gaston II tells her, smirking. He and his brother loom over her. “You think you’re special, that you can order us around because your mom’s Maleficent? That’s bullshit.”

Gaston the Third rolls up his sleeves, an ugly grin on his face. “So, I think we’ll teach you that lesson, and then maybe go pick another fight with Gil. It’s so easy to make him cry.”

Mal watches them cooly, neck titled nearly all the way back to see their faces. She nods slowly. And her lips curl up in a smile.

Look, she knows she’s short for her age.

But it comes in as an advantage when she drives her mother’s old dagger into Gaston Junior’s stomach.

*

Mal doesn’t always go about her fights the _honourable_ way. Over the course of her life, she’s learnt some really hard lessons. _You can’t save everyone_. _Sometimes playing nice isn’t enough_. But she fights for the right thing, she’s never once questioned that { _it would be hard, with Evie as her moral compass. Evie, who (even during her exile) would somehow find out about the kids being abused and get the word to Mal. Evie who learned French so that she could study Auradonian law from the one law textbook on the Isle. Evie who could convince kids raised in a prison cell to band together to protest for different conditions_ }.

_Evie & Mal & Carlos & Jay_

The four of them lead a revolution. They get rid of the Isle of the Lost entirely, converting it to a nature reserve. They start a new campaign, to abolish the prison system entirely, but it’s slow going. People in Auradon aren’t willing to admit that they were wrong about the _Isle_ , and prison abolition just seems like another smack in the face for them.

In an interview, a journalist asks them if there wasn’t another way they could have gone about it. Argues that the Isle kids were protesting the _wrong way_.

The image of them, shoulder-to-shoulder { _Mal, looking up through purple bangs with venomous green eyes, Carlos with his teeth bared, Jay with his arms crossed, proudly displaying his tattoo of the map of the Isle, Evie with disappointment in her eyes and bitter truths on her red lips_ } is plastered across the front page of every newspaper in the country.

When asked to comment on it, the four of them use the same refrain- _until there is justice, there cannot be peace_.

**Author's Note:**

> As I said in the description, this story does not refer to any current movements or protests. Black Lives Matter is important, and it's important that we speak about it, but as a white woman, it is not for me to put these characters in that context. But protests are on the mind, and in the zeitgeist, and this is the product of that. 
> 
> All of that being said, I'm not in the US, not even close, but my full support is behind the Black Lives Matter protestors. They are the ones who will move people to make actual progress. 
> 
> That being said, we can still do some things:
> 
>   * donate to [Campaign Zero](https://www.joincampaignzero.org/).
>   * sign as many of the petitions as possible from the list at [blacklivesmatters.carrd.co](https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/)
>   * educate ourselves on black and african-american history with [this](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0Bz011IF2Pu9TUWIxVWxybGJ1Ync) amazing cache of free books, films, videos, and speeches.
> 



End file.
